Briathrail // Albert 2MNG

I’ve been waiting to get this off my chest for the longest time.

Typing this blog post in makes me both angry and thankful. Angry at my stupidity and thankful for the life experience I would not have gotten if I was wise enough at the beginning. Not many had a similar path to start with.

When I started working after college, my first job was an IT outsourcing company. It was the only company that called back within a week, and it promised me I will be assigned to a “top telecom company” (which they did honor). Pay was good (only after 3 years, the first 3 years I got paid cheap, and I made it up in overtime), and I didn’t really mind the 8-to-5 work time – at first. Traffic wasn’t a factor then yet, I can come and leave on time. And I was too naive for my own good out of college. I was a mix of “eager to please” and “gets antsy whenever I leave a task unfinished for the day”, a bit like Sheldon Cooper but not in full.

And so, my first few years’ projects were my first foray to applications with actual real-world usage. Heavy and relentless, from applications managing SMS messages from roaming telco contractors to pay-per-view signups, I programmed for a lot of things with massive stakes (like if the program breaks, SMS and social media advisories will have to be released). So I tried doing overtime to help finish the tasks saddled with eye-wateringly poor timeline plotting. I couldn’t say shit – my status as a temp means I am excluded from most employee-only project meetings, and complaining’s not going to get me anywhere anyway.

The sizable overtime pay tempted me, a new graduate, raised in relative poverty. This is what they’ll pay me for an hour of extra work? Goddamn, maybe I can buy me a fancy restaurant meal and ride a taxi home instead of a bus, and have change to buy donuts on the way. I had no financial literacy whatsoever. I ended up abusing overtime so much because of my measly pay, thus I was willingly doing Saturdays and sometimes even Sundays so often that the security guard got used to me trooping in at 9am on a Saturday. My monthly timesheet once had 220 hours – 160 regular and 60 overtime.

It also didn’t help that filing for annual leaves from my outsourcing company was needlessly complicated. Paper trails and multiple signatories, to be faxed. So I barely used the leaves and let them lapse, either I cashed them partially or let them get converted to extra pay.

The first one rarely came to pass – work was incessant and unrelenting, and the telecom company I was outsourced to had grand ambitions for their IT (which backfired on them the year after I resigned). This continued for a few more years. I barely used any leaves outside of certain holidays. I earned very good money and greatly eased my parents’ financial burden of the expenses with sending my youngest sister to a top university, sure, but I very naively worked myself to the bone with money as my lodestar.

The lasting damage became that – I never got used to having a vacation. Work became my life, for the most part. No nightlife, no weekend trips, no side hustles, none. And it ingrained into me a very bad habit – a bad feeling in my stomach everytime I spend time at home doing nothing, especially during holidays or terrible raining weather. Like “I should be doing something at work right now” or “deadline’s not going to be adjusted”. Thank God the outsourcing company never issued laptops, or else I’d bring that to bed everyday.

But by 2012, real-world issues and bad habits accrued by repeated overtimes started to rear their heads and exacerbated an already bad worklife for me. Went by an inch at a time until they were undeniable and ugly.

First – Philippine traffic at the capital region started to get worse. What used to be an hour’s bus ride from 6am to 7am, soon became 7:45am, and often breached 8am for arrival. And it got worse with successive government projects. So I had to start waking up earlier at 430am so I can leave home earlier at 530am. And if I missed the alarm clock, that meant breakfast was not going to happen, I just had to hit the showers, get dressed and leave. The frustration done by that added up. The telecom company noticed many of us outsourced personnel started to clock in past 8am in massive numbers. And so, as hardcore capitalist as they were, they started putting in word to the supervisors that outsourced personnel are to observe the strict 8am rule or else they stand to lose an hour’s worth of pay. That sucked.

And second – my overtime tendencies started to become unbelievably ugly and I was too blind to see it. At a few time, I was packing extra clothes and soap in my bag because I was sleeping at the office to finish. I was working until 11pm, my home’s a solid hour away from the office. So to recoup some sleeping time, I slept at my cubicle. I woke up at 6am to take a quick cold shower at the restroom before the first employees arrived to see a fool in yesterday’s clothes.

Once, one of the departments using my application remarked in a passing discussion that I handled the only projects they had that never missed a development deadline. I could only smile to hide my pain. But inside I was furious and my internal monologue might’ve went, “if you pretentious piece of shit cocksuckers gave us reasonable timelines I wouldn’t have worked myself ragged to meet your stupid-ass milestone plotting, fuckers”. But looking back, I really should’ve asked for help. Because I was too eager to please people that never knew of the effort that took to do so.

By 2013, I had my fill of being an outsourced personnel despite the bigger pay, and was looking for “regular employee” work. I wanted to be invited to those fancy meetings, proper employee benefits, and have an official work email address. I accepted a position at the same telecom company that I worked at as an outsourced personnel. I became a “specialist” for their products, with a supervisory-level classification to boot. And this one came with many bells and whistles that made me happy again. Fancy work ID that gets me to lots of office floors. Additional hefty bonuses. My first month, my manager gave me a project that got me invited to a fancy-as-fuck hotel with an extremely impressive buffet. Employee uniforms that look like I was some banker. And finally, dignity that was afforded by status in the office.

I got hired as a supervisor mid-2013, and I settled in to a fancier cubicle and increased responsibility. I very rarely had to render overtime due to the increased pay and oversight by a proper corporate HR. However, my tendencies barely went away, it just morphed into other things. The traffic from Quezon City to Makati became so horrific during that time, and I started to accrue late demerits that caught the attention of my manager. Thus, I took the expense of renting a small studio-sized condominium unit at a place that is less than 5 kilometers away from where I work. It was very convenient to have the ability to go from office to home in less than an hour.

However, I instead opted to “stay” in the office much later. Partly because I wanted to avoid the rush hour traffic, and a lot more due to another work facet that I was not prepared to face: my manager assigned me two tasks that frequently clashed with one another with regards to time. I was a supervisor handling projects and meetings and timelines and third-party stuff… and he still gave me programmer-level work without a full IT department. In short, a full stack developer.

My manager was taking up all the minor web application tasks the marketing department wanted – and my department’s lack of “red tape” (AKA “proper IT development guidelines”) appealed to them and their preference of doing things faster, so they often went to our neck of the woods to request some newfangled functional web application that they really should’ve went to IT instead. Only my cubicle partner handled the entire set of our cloud server infrastructure and security. It is still insane to me that our servers only got hacked only once the entire time I was there, and the hacker was stupid enough to just encrypt-lock the most inconsequential server we had and not the one with the crucial data.

And as those programming tasks piled up, I had a hard time juggling them as my supervisory work needed me to be away from my cubicle a lot, while my programming work needed me to be in the cubicle a lot. So I did “unofficial” overtimes just to finish the programming work discreetly. In bunches again, too. I was doing Saturdays, again. And when it came to the allotted leaves – corporate gave me way more leaves than what I was used to in the outsourcing company – I again barely used them. I only filed the bulk of them in full around Christmas just to not get the sideye from HR. I slotted some of them around sandwich days – for example, if a public holiday fell on a Thursday, I’d file a leave day on the following Friday. And it sucked to use the leaves because I had little to do at home and the managers barely respected annual leaves regardless of notices and auto-replies. I was on a weeklong trip to Japan during my last year of employment there, and two managers (including my own) called me while I was touring Meiji Shrine and asked me about work.

I got so depressed one lonely night in 2017, that I took one good look down below the bridge I used to cross on my way home and thought, “what if I jumped to end this shit I’m in? Is the water deep enough? Will it be quick?” I quickly snapped out of it, rushed home, hugged my cat and cried myself to sleep that night. I had no appetite for dinner. I could not believe I had that train of thought. I was scared. I had no one to talk to at the time. I didn’t want to alarm my parents by calling in the middle of the night.

The next week, I took my long-planned Japan trip. I booked it many months before but I never knew until many months later how much I really needed a breather away from everything. And with the mental state I was in back then, I badly needed it. A week to clear the nasty cobwebs and enjoy an “annual leave”, truly, for the first time.

And it did help me. Greatly and immeasurably.

I had a week to enjoy what life had to offer me. I had a week where work was many miles away (not much really, two managers still called me). I had a week to just smell the roses and see the world. Eat around. See cool shit. Look for pretty things. Buy nice stuff to take home. Sleep in a fancy room with amenities.

I truly enjoyed it.

And when I got back home, I immediately reactivated my Jobstreet profile and put my resume back on. I applied for lots of jobs, and I did an interview right away with the first good-enough-offer employer that called and said yes. I immediately typed in my resignation letter to my current job, filed it, and waited for it to be sent to HR before I signed my new work contract.

I was scared and worried all the time I did that, because that company was all I knew before. That place and the adjacent building and the other building a few blocks away. Makati was the only workplace I really knew. Ins and outs.

And I was determined to leave all that, because I had an epiphany when I was riding the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Kyoto. I had stayed with the same corporation for nearly ten years – almost 5 as contracted and almost 4 as a supervisor – and I had gotten used to the place so, so much. I have given a lot. I had a lot of friends there. It helped me earn money. It helped my parents and my little sister’s college funding. But things barely changed for me, professionally. So I thought, either I force my change now, or it might never change. So my thought upon leaving the train was, I had to leave that company and start fresh somewhere else. Anywhere but there will do. And I must do it as soon as I get back or I might never have the will or chance to do so again. That was my lasting gift from that trip – the strong will to do something that scared the crap out of me to do.

So, by January 2018, I started anew. New company in a new city, new officemates, new building, better pay (benefits are another issue), and most of all, new company laptop, with 16GB instead of the potato 4GB I had in corporate. Speed and power!

And to my utmost delight, the new company had… agreeable standards when it came to time management. They were a local company with a Singaporean parent company. Granted, they’re SME-sized and I just got off a nationwide top 10 corporate company. But the change was stark but refreshing. They had projects with proper timelines and achievable milestones. Proper segregation of tasks. Project managers that looked out for me. I only rendered overtime whenever truly necessary, like evening app deployments. It was a step-up for my career as a developer, but for the first time in a long while, there was no undue pressure on me.

And the same month, I learned that my previous employer has initiated its Order 66-esque plan to gut its IT department and offload the bulk of the developers and the work to an outsourcing company. I knew of it months before as the IT department devs were staging picket rallies near the building trying to convince leadership to abandon the outsourcing plan, and clearly they failed. The department I was in changed too – reorganization. Had I stayed, I would’ve reported to a person I disliked based on testimony of some friends who worked with that person in a previous setting. My decision looked wiser and wiser by each passing month.

Six months in, the Singaporean parent company hired me full-time to go to Singapore to work there for a specific new project that needed on-hand devs. I could not believe my fortune. How I landed this chance is beyond me. God must have led me here, I thought. So I took it and never looked back. My mentality was, hey I took a chance to get out of my comfort zone, here is another, why not take a stab at it and see what happens?

However… wounds of the past were slow to heal. I still felt antsy when my task’s deadline draws near and I was chilling at home on a weekend. So I tried to escape by always getting out of the house on Saturdays and traveling to various hawker centres near and far just to give me a headspace away from “not doing something”. I later enrolled in a Japanese language class because I already visited so many hawker centres that I was doing repeats.

I was too eager to please, again. So I had to train myself, force myself, not to put my projects above my well-being. Even when the pandemic hit and there were prolonged work-from-home setups, I had to mentally stop myself from “maybe one more hour” of programming. My old excuse must be nipped from the bud. I had to find things to do after 7pm, like cooking or watching movies/anime.

And I was very thankful my Singaporean bosses never forced nor implicitly gave overtime. My new supervisors made timelines with generous but reasonable widths. I can miss deadlines and they make adjustments (I think I only missed two or three in about 5 years). And best of all – in my five years of working with them, they never bothered me during my week-long vacation jaunts. No calls, no messages, no anything. Just “have a safe trip” and that’s it. They don’t have any idea how that simple respectful gesture meant a lot to me personally. So whenever I work, I always try to give 100%. I always try to beat deadlines without overtime. I always try to make myself an asset to a project.

That kind of treatment makes me very reluctant to go back to corporate again.

And last year, 2023, I felt something have disappeared. I mean, I got so used to it being with me all the time that I just accepted it as a daily thing and paid it no more mind that it needed to have. Like a heavy monkey on your back that suddenly disappeared that, hey, my back feels lighter. I went to Malaysia for a few days during Chinese New Year, and had a nice time there, and I felt something strange, as if I left something behind but I could not point a finger or name it then. It was only after I finished my South Korea vacation that it registered to me what it was:

I had no more vacation guilt. It’s gone.

And all I truly needed was the assurance of a stable workplace and peace of mind to trust that everything will be all right. Wasn’t easy but that’s life. And I feel better after that.